AMD Radeon HD 6850 Review and Ratings

Editors’ Rating:

Our Verdict:
A fine option for mainstream gamers, this card offers up the best performance we've seen in a graphics card under $200. Just make sure your power supply can handle the 127-watt power strain. Read More…

What We Liked…

Great performance for the price

Stereoscopic-3D support with compatible monitors and HDTVs

Five ports makes connecting multiple monitors easier

What We Didn’t…

Over 9 inches long

Blocks an adjacent slot

High power draw might necessitate power-supply upgrade

AMD Radeon HD 6850 Review

When it was announced in late 2009, the ATI Radeon HD 5870 ushered in a trifecta of key graphics-card features. Along with the concurrently launched Radeon HD 5850, it was the first card to support DirectX 11 for improved graphics in next-generation games. With DisplayPort, DVI, and HDMI connectors, it allowed users to connect up to three screens to one card for more-immersive gaming. And its impressive raw performance made it the most powerful single-chip graphics card on the market—until, that is, rival Nvidia launched its first DirectX 11 card, the beastly GeForce GTX 480, in early 2010.

Now, roughly a year after the launch of the Radeon HD 5870, AMD has put to bed the ATI brand that it has been using since acquiring the graphics-chip company in 2006. The company is back with a pair of second-generation DirectX 11 graphics cards: the $239 AMD Radeon HD 6870, and the $179 AMD Radeon HD 6850. While the more-mainstream Radeon HD 5700-series graphics cards will continue to be manufactured and sold, AMD says that the HD 6800-series cards will replace its HD 5800-series cards. But before we get to the results of our benchmark tests, let's take a look at what's new with these latest cards.

First of all, with 3D movies breaking attendance records in theaters and 3D HDTVs finding their way into early adopters’ living rooms, AMD has finally added support for true 3D (in this case, stereoscopic 3D) gaming with the HD 6850 and HD 6870, as well as support for 3D Blu-ray. Nvidia has had its own GeForce 3D Vision kit available for its graphics cards since early 2009. But while Nvidia’s 3D technology uses active (that is, powered) shutter glasses, which necessitate expensive, bulky frames and a USB breakout box to make it all work, ATI’s 3D-gaming technology, dubbed HD3D, uses passive, unpowered glasses. These glasses should generally be less costly and bulky, just like those used with several 3D-centric LCD monitors that have debuted recently. (One, the Zalman ZM-M240W Trimon, we tested and panned this past summer.)

While we were less than pleased with the Zalman monitor when we reviewed it, our brief gaming experience with AMD’s HD3D on a Sony 3D HDTV at a recent press event impressed us with the technology’s potential. We saw no viewing-angle issues, the perception of depth was quite pronounced, and the image was very bright and crisp. It should be noted, though: In the demo, we were wearing Oakley-branded polarized 3D glasses. While comfortable and stylish, these glasses will likely be about as expensive as Nvidia’s powered shutter glasses.

The 6850 will occupy two expansion slots in your case, but it's packed with video connectivity options.

Also new with this line of cards is a backplane positively packed with ports. Both the HD 6850 and HD 6870 reference boards come equipped with a pair of mini-DisplayPort connectors, an HDMI port (the 1.4a variety, supporting 3D HDTVs), and a pair of DVI ports. Gamers lucky (and wealthy!) enough to own a pair of deluxe 30-inch LCD monitors for their gaming will want to be aware, though, that only one of the two DVI ports on these cards is of the dual-link variety necessary to run a screen at 2,560x1,600 resolution. As a result, if at least one of your huge screens doesn’t have a DisplayPort interface, you’ll have to buy an adapter.

Like the last-generation Radeons, these cards also feature DirectCompute support, allowing developers to create games and applications that use the graphics processor to speed computations and program new effects. Nvidia cards also feature similar capabilities. But while there is indeed vast potential for speeding up many computing tasks using GPUs, the vast majority of today’s software doesn’t yet take advantage of DirectCompute. CyberLink’s software is one exception; their apps use the GPU to speed up video transcoding and face recognition for photo tagging. But unless you constantly convert videos or tag large numbers of photos, you won’t likely find much substantive value in GPU-based computing with these cards until more software is written to take full advantage of DirectCompute.

For those interested in the technical details, the Radeon HD 6850 has a core clock speed of 775MHz (the HD 5870 ran at 850MHz), sports 1GB of the now-familiar GDDR5 RAM, is packed with 960 Stream Processors, and (like its more-expensive counterpart, the HD 6870) uses just 19 watts of power when not under load. The HD 6850 does suck down a maximum of 127 watts under full load, according to AMD. That's a bit high for a mainstream card, and it may necessitate upgrading your power supply along with your graphics card. The card also requires a six-pin connector from your power supply, so be sure your power supply has one, or that the card you buy comes with an adapter.

Taking a look at the performance numbers, the HD 6850 doesn't break any benchmark-test records, but seeing as it's under $200, we didn't expect it to. After all, the current single-graphics-chip champ, Nvidia's GeForce GTX 480, sold for close to $500 at the time of this review. The HD 6850's performance is impressive for the price, however. In most of our tests, it kept pace with (and in some cases surpassed) EVGA's overclocked version of Nvidia's GeForce GTX 465. Considering that the EVGA card sold for $250 or more at the time of this review, that's a fine feat for a card that's about $70 less expensive. But the dynamics may well change quickly: With the more powerful HD 6870 also offering great performance in its higher ($240) price range, we expect these cards to usher in price drops for many competing cards.

In our 3DMark Vantage test, a synthetic suite designed to measure overall gaming performance, the HD 6850 scored 13,636 in Performance mode and 6,039 at the test's more demanding Extreme setting. Those scores are slightly lower than EVGA's overclocked GTX 465, which scored 14,650 in Performance mode and 6,204 in Extreme mode on the same test. While the differences aren't major, these scores indicate that the EVGA card does have slightly more potential gaming muscle—though with a $70 price disparity when this review was written, it should.

Our real-world gaming test results weren't quite as favorable to the EVGA card. In our DirectX 11 Heaven benchmark test, the HD 6850 came in slightly ahead of the EVGA GTX 465 at all resolutions, and the differences increased the more we cranked up the screen size. Starting out at 1,680x1,050 (the typical screen resolution you'll find on 22-inch LCDs), the HD 6850 cranked out 29.4 frames per second (fps), while the EVGA GTX 465 managed a near-identical 29fps. At the 24-inch monitor resolution of 1,920x1,200, the HD 6850 turned in an average of 25.3fps, while the EVGA GTX 465 slipped to 23.9fps. Stepping up to the super-high 2,560x1,600 (a resolution typically seen only on 30-inch monitors), the HD 6850 pulled further ahead with an average frame rate of 16.8fps, while the EVGA GTX 465 fell a fair bit behind (to 12fps). While many of these numbers aren't playable frame rates, bear in mind that the Heaven test is a very demanding benchmark test designed to tax even the highest-end graphics cards, and it shouldn't be taken as an indication of either card's expected frame rates running an average DirectX 11 game. Note also that we ran these tests using the older 1.0 version of Heaven, so we could be sure that all numbers were comparable between cards. (We run this test with Shader settings set to high, Tessellation enabled, and Antistrophy and Antialiasing settings both locked at 4x.)

Moving on to DirectX 10 performance, in our test using the recent game Just Cause 2, the HD 6850 pulled farther ahead of the EVGA GTX 465, especially at resolutions below 2,560x1,600. At 1,920x1,200, the HD 6850 turned in an average frame rate of 39.1fps, while the EVGA card only managed 26fps. At a resolution of 1,680x1,050, the HD 6850 averaged 46.9fps, while the EVGA only mustered up 30fps. And at the extreme 2,560x1,600 setting, the results were close, but the HD 6850 still won out (29.8fps, to the EVGA's 27fps).

We also tested the card with an older DirectX 10 title, Far Cry 2, and performance differences were minimal until we hit the highest resolution. The HD 6850 delivered average frame rates of 87.9fps at 1,680x1,050, 77.8fps at 1,920x1,200, and 53.9fps at 2,560x1,600. The EVGA card did manage a slightly better 90.7fps at the lowest of these resolutions, but it ran about 2fps behind the HD 6850 at 1,920x1,200, and close to 4fps behind at 2,560x1,600.

Be sure your power supply has a six-pin connector, and that it can handle the 6850's 127-watt maximum power draw.

Like we said in our review of the Radeon HD 6870, AMD seems to be borrowing a page from its current CPU lineup with the Radeon HD 6850. Instead of gunning for ultimate performance at any cost, the company is (with this round of cards, at least) attempting to impress by offering exceptional performance for the price. In that light, the HD 6850 is indeed a winner. In our tests, the card performed close to even with or slightly better than much costlier Nvidia cards, while adding HD3D support and plenty of connectivity options for users of multiple monitors.

Costlier cards like the HD 6870 will of course give you higher frame rates and allow you to avoid upgrading for longer as newer games become more demanding. But if you're looking for a budget-friendly card to play today's games on a single screen at resolutions up to 1,920x1,200 without compromising, the Radeon HD 6850 is a superior choice in this price range.

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